


Viewpoint

by Alias (anafabula)



Series: What if we had a daemon AU, but every time there’s magic physics it got longer [1]
Category: Magic: The Gathering
Genre: 1) Apply owl to eye; 2) ???; 3) Profit, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Child Abuse, Eye Gouging, Eye Trauma, Gen, Introspection, Local man tsundere toward own soul, Non Consensual Daemon Touching, Same-Sex Daemons, for Test of Metal values of ‘canon’, theoretical physics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-19
Updated: 2019-03-19
Packaged: 2019-11-24 11:30:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18164633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias
Summary: I am eleven, approximately, and our repertoire of forms is further constrained by that neither Aike nor I will be prey animals.





	Viewpoint

**Author's Note:**

> If you have thoughts on how to make the warnings more detailed/explicit/useful, please let me know. It’s been a concern. 
> 
> There are worldbuilding deets in the notes!

A concept, for reference: I am eleven years old. Approximately.

This puts Aike and I in a mildly awkward position. I am old enough to have my name, my purpose, the localized beginning of a reputation; young enough that any form he takes is a juvenile, the deeply discomforted clumsiness of new skin or fur or scales a reflection of my own inabilities to keep up as my legs get away from me. People look at us and we do not make as solid an impression as we require.

While even with the frankly pathetic diet rendered by living in Tidehollow I do not appear to be small for my age, I also know that doesn't _matter_ when my aggressors are universally larger than me. It's an occupational hazard of having by and large subdued all my peers. There are no victories, only adjustments. Yet.

Aike and I avoid birds. I think about it, or perhaps he does. He flares with discomfort at fur and at touching the ground, but dislikes not being seen. Compounding our mutual bodily instability, he attaches himself to me almost every time he can. But we avoid birds, because I know that my father would _love_ for Aike to be one: something with wings and keen sight he could force me to send scrapping on unsteady ground until my hands shook and I blacked out. As far as I remember, we've never even tried for wings on our own, just in case it stuck.

As a result, I have no idea how the following test case and all its ramifications came about.

I suspect even at the time that Aike's been dwelling on it more than me; I lack the gift of introspection, and likely the charisma, that seems to enable most people's relationships with their daemons. So we'd had time to think only in vague muttered theories, discussing what I felt in the abstract without knowing words.

The words I learned later said that we were talking about the resemblance in mana saturation around and incarnation of daemons and spellwork, compared to the accumulative tingling of etherium shards lodged under my skin that I could tell already would never be enough. I lacked theory or practice but I knew mages' daemons were relevant to what they did somehow, not just in shape but in the fact of their existence, hoped I was right in guessing how: that they bridge the gap between the flesh and the useful parts, let us lay hands on luminous impossibility — much like etherium itself. (I'd hone this theory in my mind, lying exhausted-awake, and, as it hurt, think about my right arm.)

Although, of course, while I could sense daemons as a basic function of mana currents, and at the time assumed all people had this faculty, I could neither control nor hoard and harvest them. Not even — see: paucity of introspection — my own.

But back to the matter at hand.

I am eleven, approximately, and our repertoire of forms is further constrained by that neither Aike nor I will be prey animals. Even when I'm lost and bracing myself when he bolts he's a scorpion, or something with fangs, even when they're useless. Even when they're worse than useless. I do not so much as imagine doing otherwise.

There are people in power whose souls would be powerless against something carnivorous and determined. I've seen them. But that will not and cannot be me, when I've seen the broken examples thereof, when I know what I will have to lose if and when I win anything at all.

(If I think about this at the time, I think _when_ , and flex my hand for the two-point reminder provided by everything within that inferior husk.)

So the preconditions for this discovery are met: I have enemies and a steady push of constant, suffocating ambition, and Aike has hungry eyes and the reflexes of a scrapper who isn't dead turned toward violence. The proof of concept was easily inevitable, and quickly loses its ability to perturb me. I just wish I knew how it happened.

Aike might know, but I'm not the type to ask.

The memory starts for me here: I blink and a weight on my shoulders is there and then gone, replaced by a loud thump. I appear to have been in the middle of attempting to stand up from the ground, and the counterbalance lost sends me stumbling wide for a full step and then some. My face is wet with what is likely blood, but I feel nothing other than awareness of the spatial shifts needed to put myself where I need to be. My body is a distant system of pulleys and everything is flat.

Including the people around me, rearing backward, frozen, and the screaming.

Everything moves slow. Awareness of what I am other than some machine I should keep upright for an indeterminate reason rolls in slow and thick as water downriver. These things take mere seconds: a great gray bird surging forward — I blink and the blood in my eyelashes smears across it for a moment — alighting on something that is falling, with some clumsiness, until it gets its bearings.

I wonder where Aike is on the breath I take stepping back, and I stop wondering on the exhale.

The tenor of the screaming implies that no one else notices when the bird falters. This is understandable. The bird found purchase on the boy facing me, first chasing him off of me and then sending him to the ground, by way of his face; its talons have gone through his cheeks and fixed smartly around his jaw for purchase as it tears out his eyes. He will try scrambling backward on his hands and knees, which dislodges nothing, and batting at the violent feathered body, but something repels his hands. Soon enough he resigns himself to screaming.

The hooked beak is harsh and indiscriminate; he's losing strips of skin off his forehead, any easy target from the brow, ragged stretches of eyelid tacky with vitreous humor. And the eye itself, none of which comes out cleanly — it's ripped out in handfuls, white shell and dripping pulp engraved on my mind before immediately being overwhelmed by blood.

At that point there are already people fleeing. The transformation of his face putting the glorified rot inside on display is frankly entrancing — and I'm not even the one watching it, doing it, that's Aike, and I can _feel_ it, _that's Aike_ — but that will have to wait, because several fragments of a minute before Aike's coated his face in shredded skin and the gore that sat within him I am regaining awareness of my surroundings and being attacked by a dog.

Wait. No. Wolf. Large wolf. His daemon, there we go, going for some last-ditch reciprocity of violence in the absence of reticence or rescue.

Good idea. All teeth. But he's _trying_ as opposed to doing it, and so is she. Leaping for my throat as I'm obviously off-balance in more ways than one is exactly what she needs to do, but trying to kill me still requires touching me. His screaming is increasingly guttural, and the sounds of our observers existing in horror are slowly phasing into my awareness, and his daemon balks.

I don't.

She undermines her own momentum at the last second, but she's still lunging at me, and I grab her by the neck and take her down.

I think this is well into the point where everyone present was locked into the panic reflex they'd chosen, and evidently no one picked "fight".

This was illogical, obviously. If they'd thought at all past her terrified animal noises of increasing intensity and his screaming and the audible — at least to me — wet rips as Aike gets a hold of a long strip of skin solid enough to tear instead of merely bite off, they would realize that what this meant was that Aike and I were thoroughly _occupied_. They could treat it like any other distraction and fall upon us with an advantage.

But instead they froze, because none of them wanted to risk being the object of our focus. The blank willingness to perform horrific acts served to make Aike and I invulnerable. Fear of being subject to such acts made a remainder who still far outnumbered us unable to take me down even as the acts themselves were why they wanted to.

This experience proved greatly instructive. Perhaps we even became something other than human, there, for that.

But back at the proof:

They could come at me. I am bending down, eyes forward to the ground and back open, my spine crying out for a knife in it. I am not — though I don't remember the provenance of that status, either — even particularly clothed, leaving fewer remaining places to hide weaponry. I would have to turn to throw an attacker off and fight back. My singular focus could kill me so easily—

And it doesn't, and they don't. Nothing happens except the blood pounds in my ears and I flatten my hand on her neck as Aike does something pointed that goes too far into his face. If I were holding down a human being I'd go for a weapon but this, by contrast, is _easy_ : the daemon thrashes but contact appears to debilitate her, and my full weight leaned into that hand catches the wolf and the wriggling snake and the thrashing sparrow. Much like his screaming, the wail keeps up through each different larynx. I consider the frenetic rush of feeling, of nerves firing randomly, that travels up my arm, and suppose she must be in pain.

Then she's a beetle, and my hand comes down so hard I feel the shell crack. Just slightly, but I feel it, and I think Aike does too. He stops. I know that, see without seeing the ruin of the beetle's boy's face.

"Do you want to die?" I ask the daemon, softly. She has ceased to move.

No answer. I look up. "Do you _want_ to die?" I demand, louder, of my erstwhile aggressor, of everyone.

The hard, loud wing beats, again, and then Aike's weighing down my shoulder. I can't examine how that sound makes me feel; it is self-evidently a problem solved. The end.

Seeing the boy's face for myself takes my breath away. He burbles out blood through the holes in his cheeks as well as through his mouth, and some remaining skin and muscle might just be shaking with the broken reflexes to blink. His eyelids are ribbons. The thick sections of flesh torn off and left hanging, the smeared muck that must be his eyeballs—

"No," he manages thickly, snapping me out of that... consideration.

His daemon is trembling under my hand, vibrating under my fingers. I let her go, tensing up to guard, but all she does is fly back to him, all _he_ does is grope blindly until he can catch her with his palms. She's something round, mammalian, and herbivorous, then.

I put my hand on Aike's feet where he's holding my shoulder as I rise. "Good," I say. My daemon's feet are tacky with blood. We have never touched anyone before, I think. My nerves are still singing.

I look around. There are a few stragglers left. Daemons appear even more fearful than their humans. Humans imagine dying, I suppose, while this is the first time many of their daemons have imagined being so much as touched.

Someone behind us is regaining enough composure to start to snarl, I find, when Aike's head turns toward them.

He crouches slightly and opens his wings, just a bit. I touch his feathers and wheel around, jabbing a thumb at the wreck behind me. "You want to look like that?" I ask a handful of observers, grinding edges onto the consonants hard.

The answers are sullen but negative.

"Then don't _fuck_ with us," I say, and then we make a gamble: I walk off.

All (but one) watch. None follow.

* * *

I don't expect Aike to shift again, dully, although I also didn't expect this to happen. I am years out from any kind of competence in contingency planning at this time. The future is what happens after I do what is available from the brute reality of what is.

Aike is a strix, a great owl, the only birds that survive Tidehollow without stooping to feed on corpses. Even in other parts of Vectis there are enough green things to sustain herbivores. Just not here.

The trudge home, such as it is, is long and of no particular urgency to me. I've already placed my daily bet on what scraps it will take for my father to believe he's the only reason I've worked my fingers to bleeding. I wonder how fast the story will spread, and what it will look like.

"I need to wash this off," Aike says with disgust. My forearm can barely hold him but he's decided I need the eyeful. Under the blood and gory miscellanea he's banded in shades of gray and darker gray. He shakes out his wings irritably, demonstrating the extent of blood splatter.

I'm less impressed by it than he is. _He_ has spent over a decade avoiding the kind of thing ingrained under my fingernails, and in my scalp, and in every fold in my skin (by my twenties my best guess will simply be that my body had long since decided registering an immune response to skin infections beyond vague inconvenience yielded no return on investment) but I find myself wondering if Aike's ability to dodge that was a factor of youth. Him shifting always dispensed with anything clinging and extraneous. Given that's no longer an option, has he been reduced by this revelation to something closer to the mere physical?

I brush some of the human pulp off his chest. The feathers are very soft, under it.

" _What_ ," he says, the irritation carried on a nearly-subvocal pleased-bird noise that I'm mildly surprised to interpret.

I work my jaw for a moment. What I think is that his wingspan looked to be the better part of my height, and the undignified frizz around his head is redundant evidence that both of us have more growing to do. (I'll equal my father's height soon, but that, like equaling many things about my father, is deeply unimpressive.) I am thinking in the most abstract sense possible about lift and thrust and drag, about distance, about rising into the air like a scream.

What I say is, "Yeah," habit aspirating most of the affirmative, "you're disgusting."

"Fuck you too," he says, and transfers himself comfortably back to my shoulder.

* * *

My father hits me when he finds out that Aike and I are, in his framing, _stuck like this_ , which is how I discover that we are evidently too young to have acquired permanent form. Then he does not stop.

Aike scores the edge of the glorified hovel’s single table with his talons. It barely holds up. He makes himself large — I am beginning to suspect that holding his wings sprawled into the air is his _default_ , and it makes sense, I suppose, if we in any way share elbows and shoulders — _so someday I'll fix it_ is appended to that idea, as a reflex; _I’m_ going _to fix it_ — and perhaps my father notices the blood, or the sharp edges that his mole daemon lacks, or maybe he's just bored.

But he lets me go.

I scrub at my face to keep up appearances, as my left eye is watering, but it barely stings.

**Author's Note:**

> Aike’s name, irl, is a Frisian nickname for German names beginning with agil (blade, edge of the sword). He’s a great horned owl. They’re cute when they’re fuzzy juveniles, and will kill and eat almost anything.   
>    
> The model of daemon gender I use has it more as a marker of social liminality/noncompliance than any strong pointer toward personal identity. And whether that marker is causative or correlation is up in the air. It’s comparable to lefthandedness in many ways — including carrying a hugely variable amount of both social/logistical inconvenience and stigma.
> 
> If you believe it’s a personality trait, perhaps it could also be seen to indicate a kind of personal inflexibility that makes clashing with normality more likely. But really I do it by feel. 
> 
> The relationship between daemons and mana is similar to that in canon of daemons and Dust; they’re effectively made of it but by default won’t be much use in that regard. Beyond that... remains to be seen, maybe. (I would like to make this a series.)
> 
> I can be slow to reply but I live for social interaction! Comments feed the engine I have in place of a soul, and the engine ever hungers.


End file.
